


I Love You

by mytea



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Fluff without Plot, M/M, Short, disgusting, it's so gross, look at that title, word vomit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-27
Packaged: 2018-04-22 18:45:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4846307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytea/pseuds/mytea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hal waxes poetic. Bruce laments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hal

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this sitting around for a long time, and it really would never have happened without the very nice comments you guys left on my other post. Every one of them gave me a boost of morale, so I thank you!

Hal imagines that when a cornered circus performer meets the eyes of a snarling lion or when a prizefighter sees his own blood splattering across an opponent’s grimace, this is what they experience. A vacuum where fear peaks and blinks out of existence. Madness and energy and life. 

He’d thought that kind of clarity could only reach him in the slickest of flight maneuvers and in miles and miles of black, empty space. He’d always craved those moments, but nothing compared to this. 

This being Bruce fucking Wayne backed up against a wall. Bracketed between his forearms, but not in the least bit caged. With eyes like that lion, out for blood. Black hair against white walls and white skin and blue, blue, blue sucking the air out of his lungs. 

Hal leans forward to steal his breath back from Bruce’s lips, but here in his arms, Hal doesn’t know how to breathe. He spends too long just brushing their mouths together, memorizing the catch and drag of his chapped flesh against Bruce’s. When they do kiss, Hal stomach tightens like he’s coming out of a 5-G turn, and he’s never felt so powerful and so helpless. 

Their relationship is lightning in a bottle, he knows that. Completely impossible and if anyone walked down the Watchtower corridor right now they would think they'd slipped into an alternate universe. And only after they finished laughing at the ridiculous sight of Hal Jordan, out of uniform, squirming against the Batman. Pressed hard up into Bruce like he was trying to join him in the shadows that make up his body. Holding his face between his hands—holding him so that he couldn’t fade into the dark without him.

Hal almost hopes it’s that risk making his heart race like this. That he’s getting off on the very likely chance that Batman has the sense to push him away and never touch him again. But Bruce isn’t pushing him away, has never pushed him away, and Hal doesn’t know what to do with that. He just knows the landmine will explode the second he steps back, and he hasn’t really figured out why he’d want to. He feels Bruce’s hand on his arm and Bruce’s tongue on his teeth and Bruce’s heart actually beating against his chest, and he doesn’t know why he’d want to be anywhere but here.

In a little over two hours, he’ll be repeating himself. He’ll have his sheets on the floor and Bruce on the bed and the rest of the world will disappear. The light will come in with a breeze through the open window and paint Bruce’s skin in warm tones, and Hal will think less about hurricanes and grease fires and more about stars and rare, beautiful flowers.

He’ll think a lot of stupid shit that he won’t say, like he does every day he spends with Bruce. 

He’ll think, when Bruce sort-of-smiles up at him, that he’ll have plenty of those those days left to say it. 


	2. Bruce

Bruce is, above all else, a detective. He’s served many purposes for the league and for his city over the years, but this is something he always comes back to. He enjoys solving problems—or perhaps just cannot help solving them. He absorbs everything and never forgets, storing information in every shadowed corner in his mind. He knows where _Pleurotus nebrodensis_ grows and how to construct a pirogue and the name of every couture shoe designer in Europe. He knows when street cleaners operate in Gotham and the migration patterns of the calliope hummingbird. He also knows that these facts, no matter how valuable, amount to nothing if he is not ready to leave them behind.

He learned a decade ago, suffocating ten feet underground in Giza, to let go of his best laid plans. He is reminded all the time in Gotham, by hearts left on his doorstep and Jason Blood in his passenger seat.

Hal reminds him too.

In the best and worst ways.

Hal rips victory from oblivion and runs into battle with nothing but a refusal to back down. Hal kisses him in the doorway of his apartment as though the building is burning to the ground and licks away every excuse that waits on the tip of Bruce’s tongue.

Bruce knows Hal is powerful—an irresistible force. That all his power is born from his mind, his creativity, hasn’t quite stopped amazing him yet. But Hal is a reckless, stubborn fool. His harebrained solutions almost always put him in danger. They also, he loathes to admit, almost always succeed.

So Bruce thinks he was doomed from the moment he met Hal—since before he even knew him. Because of course he would fall for this man, brilliant and arrogant and the fucking embodiment of fight and will. Bruce knows his type—knows Selina and Harvey and Talia—and knows the ending. Hal holds him to the bed only because Bruce lets him, and Bruce knows he is ruined.

Hal was not part of his plan, but he is everything impossible made possible, unstoppable. Hal looks at Bruce like he is carved of cinnabar in one moment and ruby in the next, and Bruce tries to know why but doesn’t. Bruce tries to know what will happen next and can’t.

Hal slides his fingers up the inside of his wrist for no apparent reason at all, and eventually Bruce will remember to let go.

He looks up at Hal and tries to think of everything he wants to tell him and all the right things to say.

Soon, he’ll know the words.


End file.
